George Osborne’s Discreet Ambition

LONDON — One election spawns another. In the contest in May between the Conservative and Labour parties for national power, the Tory prime minister, David Cameron, prevailed by a small but decisive margin. The horse race to succeed his vanquished opponent, Ed Miliband, is now consuming Labour. But — at a slower pace — the Conservatives are also assessing the runners and riders to take the place of Mr. Cameron, who has said he will not lead his party into the next general election in 2020.

The show business candidate is undoubtedly Boris Johnson, mayor of London until May 2016 and now also a newly elected member of Parliament for a west London suburb. Mr. Johnson is the country’s most popular Tory by far — able, by sheer force of personality and tousle-haired charisma, to appeal to voters who otherwise disdain his party. It is a tribute to his star status that Mr. Cameron has granted to Mr. Johnson, who is not a government minister, the right to attend cabinet meetings.

So, Mr. Johnson appears the outright favorite for the leadership. But the result is by no means foregone. In this race of tortoises and hares, it is often the meticulous strategist who pulls ahead of flashier tacticians.

Enter George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer (and Mr. Cameron’s neighbor in Downing Street).

On July 8, Mr. Osborne will deliver a special budget. Traditionally, this formal parliamentary announcement of the government’s tax and spending plans forms the chancellor’s annual set piece, usually timed to coincide with the beginning and end of the financial year.

Thus Mr. Osborne’s last budget was in March when he was still chancellor of a coalition government, in which the Conservatives shared power with the Liberal Democrats. Now, two months after the Tory election victory that Mr. Osborne helped mastermind, and freed from the constraints of bipartisanship, he will issue a new set of financial measures. This will therefore be the first fully Conservative budget since Kenneth Clarke’s last, in November 1996.

Those who hoped for an end to austerity are in for a shock. Already, Mr. Osborne has announced £3 billion ($4.65 billion) of cuts for this financial year. On June 10, in his annual speech to city financiers at the Mansion House, he warned of the “harsh fiscal realities” he now intends to tackle. So: more public spending cuts, and legislation compelling a budget surplus to pay down Britain’s monstrous debt, which last year reached £1.26 trillion (nearly $2 trillion), or about 85 percent of annual gross domestic product.

Mr. Johnson, who was the ringmaster of the 2012 London Olympics, trades on his indefatigable optimism. Mr. Osborne, in contrast, was booed at the Games, amid gloomy economic headlines.

That year — Mr. Osborne’s worst, when his March budget was widely mocked in the media as “omnishambles” — Mr. Cameron was under intense pressure to replace the embattled chancellor. But the prime minister stood by his closest lieutenant, and to the chagrin of his enemies, Mr. Osborne has proved remarkably resilient.

He has made a political virtue of his implacable fiscal strategy — wisely conceding as far back as 2011 that his plan to wipe out the deficit would take longer than a single Parliament. By this year’s general election, voters had grown used to the idea and were more easily persuaded by the Tory pitch of “Let us finish the job.”

As a tribute to Mr. Osborne’s achievement in steering the British economy back to recovery, Mr. Cameron appointed him “first secretary of state” immediately after the election. The title is honorific but freighted with political significance: By granting it, the prime minister made clear that he regards Mr. Osborne as his most senior colleague and, by implication, his preferred candidate in the leadership race to come. In a further measure of Mr. Osborne’s enhanced authority, the prime minister also put him in charge of renegotiating Britain’s terms of membership of the Europe Union, ahead of the planned referendum next year or in 2017.

Pundits sometimes claim that Mr. Osborne has given up any ambition of becoming Tory leader. They point to the cordial relationship he has with Mr. Johnson. Surely, they reason, the chancellor’s efforts to cultivate a partnership with the more charismatic Tory show that he has abandoned hopes of leading the party.

This is not how Mr. Osborne’s mind works, or how he practices the art of politics. He and Mr. Cameron learned a crucial lesson from watching their Labour predecessors, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, tear at each other’s flesh. They vowed not to repeat the mistake — and Mr. Osborne privately gave a solemn undertaking never to destabilize Mr. Cameron or take advantage of others’ hostile actions.

But that does not mean Mr. Osborne has no desire to be prime minister. On the contrary, he believes he would do well in the top job. At 44, he has time on his side — and plenty of historical precedent: Since 1900, 10 chancellors have gone on to become prime minister (compared with 26 who have not).

Mr. Osborne would bring more to the leader’s job than merely the experience of a fiscal technician. He is an authentically modern politician: socially liberal, hawkish on the “war on terror,” at ease with technology.

And the new government is full of “Georgians,” loyalists who owe their advancement to Mr. Osborne: politicians like Sajid Javid, the business secretary, Amber Rudd, the energy secretary, and Matthew Hancock, the Cabinet Office minister. Like mafia soldiers, they could be easily mobilized in the interests of their capo, promoting his cause in the leadership contest when it comes.

If I were Mr. Johnson, I would bear in mind Don Corleone’s maxim: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Matthew d’Ancona is a political columnist for The Guardian and The Evening Standard and a contributing opinion writer.

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